Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

EVENTS

The skeptical and atheist communities overlap significantly with a great many other social causes. The confrontational and the accomodationist have pressed into the northeast and southwest; feminists and male supremacists carved out chunks on each side of a great rift down the center; gun control advocates and self-proclaimed gun nuts both push toward the middle of our communities from opposite sides. Some communities advocating social change overlap ours by default, thanks to shared enemies — the LGBTQ communities are an excellent example. There are a scant few social causes that overlap so significantly with our goals of humanitarianism and evidence-based ethical frameworks that there is no counterpart pushing back against the cause keeping it from taking the community by storm — the only real obstacle to its widespread adoption as a cause amongst our community’s participants is the utter silence about the problem.

The nice thing is, breaking that sort of silence usually only takes one brave soul in a position to speak loudly enough to make their voice heard. Sometimes the conversation doesn’t start immediately, sometimes that tinder must be struck a number of times, but once the conversation that everyone so desperately needs has begun, it will sweep across our community like a wild fire.[Read more…]

Our brains are full of such bugs, being the product of evolution rather than design. Is it that your brain is layering their faces due to them flashing by so quickly? Or is there something haywire with our facial pattern recognition in our peripheral vision? I saw lots of cyclopses, goblins, and at least one pointy-toothed underbite. Scrolling through the video again, I saw nothing but normal girls, mostly without makeup.